Why should it be legal?
Because you shouldn’t be in my doctor’s office deciding what risks to my health, mental and physical, are worth me taking.
Those decisions are up to me, because I’m the only one who is capable of making that decision.
Who else is? You? Government? I don’t think so.
Yes, you’re right. You should be able to go to the doctor and make decisisons about your body. But abortion is you making a decision about someone else’s body.
No, it’s making a decision about my body.
That decision happens to be that I don’t want anything in my body sucking nutrients and oxygen out of my blood.
So, because it’s an inconvenience to you, it’s ok to kill it?
Let’s say a couple already has a couple of children and is expecting another. They say “We have two children and one on the way” instead of simply saying “we have three children”
I have a question for those “life begins at conception” folks. A sizable percentage of fertilized eggs don’t implant on the womb, and are washed away during menstruation. Should women who are sexually active bury their maxipads and have funerals for the poor embryo that didn’t survive?
:eek: 
Ok, I’m at a loss for words to answer an absurd question like this.
My reasons really aren’t anyone’s business but mine and my doctor’s.
It goes beyond inconvenience. Far beyond. To the point that I will not risk the damage to my health that pregnancy will do.
Let me see if I can phrase it in a way that might make Blalron’s point a little better (and apologies to him if I’m misinterpreting):
A sizeable percentage of fertilized eggs don’t implant in the womb, and are washed away during menstruation. If a woman who believed that life began at conception knew of this happening in her case, would she be justified in reacting in exactly the same way to this as to a miscarriage? Why or why not?
What an odd question. She most certainly WOULD be justified in reacting that way. The fact is that most people don’t because they’re not aware of this happening.
Moreover, it is easier to bond with a embryo or a fetus than with a fertilized egg. This merely speaks to the mother’s state of mind though, and says nothing about the status of the zygote itself.
Which merely speaks to the inaccuracy of their terminology, rather than anything else. We should know better than to base moral judgments on colloquial expressions, rather than scientific facts.
Criminal justice has alot to do with the notion of mens rea, which is loosely thought of as “intent” but more in practive it more accurately means “guilty mind.” Women who abort their babies obviously aren’t thinking of them as equivalent to postnatal infants. Although I’m sure they realize on some level that they’re taking a life, I’m not sure they have the “guilty mind” we commonly assume a murderer has. A woman who committed infanticide upon her postnatal baby would generally be thought of as mentally deranged, and probably would not actually be charged with murder as if she had killed an adult. It’s generally thought that something must be wrong with such a person, and we adapt punishment accordingly.
I think the punishment for committing an abortion needs to be realistic, and I think that a commonly given 20-year sentence as one might get for ordinary murder doesn’t match the mens rea involved.
The moral equivalency is clear to me. A child removed from the mother’s womb early during the pregnancy, and theoretically kept alive with advanced technology, is no different than that same child still in the womb. The location (in womb vs. out of womb) can’t possibly justify it being okay to kill one and not the other. It’s the same baby. However, if the women committing abortions actually thought this through, they would never get them in the first place. They edge around the issue, play tricks on themselves to justify what they’re doing. Consequently, they don’t really know what they’re doing, and so are somewhat different from a common murderer. For that reason I wouldn’t necessarily punish them as such.
I think the person who actually performs the procedure, or prescribes the “magic baby-killing pill”, should be punished, the crime being a felony. This acts as a deterrent and effectively prevents the procedure from being available and carried out. If the deterrent is lacking, the punishments could be adjusted, and the woman seeking to abort the baby could also be tried as a felon. In such case, if the abortion attempt fails, clearly the child would have to be taken away from her after its birth. It would hardly do to leave a child with a mother who tried to kill it.
So if you were to have an abortion for the sake of looking better in a bikini, that would be nobody’s business but yours and the doctor’s?
Sheesh.
I am mentally ill, to some degree. I am not fit to be a parent. My disease is progressive, and many people with it commit suicide. I would never bring a child into this world just to watch her mother kill herself.
Pregnacy is iffy. I cannot promise that I would keep my doctors appointments and maintain a healthy body. I can only guess what I bunch of wierd hormones would do to me. The drugs that keep my brain chemistry in control cannot be taken during pregnancy, as they will harm the fetus. If I got pregnant, I would risk either bringing a deformed child into the world, or risk going completely out of my head.
Is celebacy my only option- even if I were married? Or do I have a right to maintain my body whatever way I see fit- even if it is ultimately about “conveinence”?
even sven, I think you are presenting a false dilemma. Think about it.
Boy, I step away for a day or so…
Regarding quote tags and links: Quote tags do help make things easier to follow. So long as you are not distorting what someone else has written, different styles of quoting are not a violation of the board rules, but a lot of us do find that idiosyncratic quoting styles can make things a little harder to follow. You can use the standard format for quoted text on this board by enclosing the quoted text in quote tags:
[quote]The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog.[/quote]
Becomes:
You can quote another person’s entire post by just clicking on the “quote” button at the bottom of the post, which opens up a new reply window with that person’s post enclosed in quote tags; it also includes the vB tags (**"[**b]" and "[/b]") to bold the whole post (which actually I don’t like) and puts the “Originally posted by so-and-so” line at the top. Be advised that quoting an entire post to reply to one line can also be irritating; also, the quote feature doesn’t cope very well with nested quotes (where the post you are quoting in turn quoted one of your own earlier posts, for example). However, you can edit the text included from the other post just like you can edit your own–that is, you can snip it down to the sentence or paragraph you actually want to reply to, keeping in mind the rule against actually changing what the person has written. Use the “preview” button to check how everything will actually look. (I will no doubt preview this post repeatedly, with all the formatting and links in it.)
As for links, links are an accepted way of providing outside references on the SDMB. No one has to click them of course, but they may be important to your opponent’s argument; conceivably, you could also catch your opponent out if they’re being overly artful in the use of quotations out of context, for example. (“Hey, I followed your link, and Gandhi didn’t say that–he really said the exact opposite!”) Objectionable links–links to pornographic sites or to “jack-in-the-box” sites (which aren’t the same thing as “pop-up” ads, which are irritating but very hard to avoid on the Web) should be reported to the moderators for that forum (which can be done by clicking the “Report this post to a moderator” link at the bottom of the post). You can also check out where a link will take you by “hovering” your cursor over the link and looking at the status bar at the bottom of the page, to make sure that that link to CNN.com won’t actually take you to someplace else.
Now that all that is out of the way…
If those who want to make abortion illegal are arguing for a moral equivalency between babies and zygotes, embryos, and fetuses, I don’t think the murder/manslaughter distinction holds up well. Murder is generally considered to be, in the first degree, “a murder that is committed with premeditation”, or in the second degree (in jurisdictions which make that distinction), “a murder that is committed without premeditation but with some intent”, where murder generally is "the crime of unlawfully and unjustifiably killing another ". Manslaughter is “the unlawful killing of a human being without malice”; “voluntary manslaughter” is “manslaughter resulting from an intentional act done without malice or premeditation and while in the heat of passion or on sudden provocation”. (I don’t think “involuntary manslaughter” could apply here.) It may be objected that a woman who has an abortion is acting without malice, but legally the definition of malice seems to simply boil down to “the intention or desire to cause harm (as death, bodily injury, or property damage) to another through an unlawful or wrongful act without justification or excuse” or “wanton disregard for the rights of others or for the value of human life”. If the zygote, embryo, or fetus in all stages of the pregnancy is held to be morally and legally equivalent to a newborn baby as the basis for a law making abortion illegal, then a woman who deliberately has an abortion is surely showing an “intention or desire to cause harm” and a “wanton disregard” for the life of her supposed baby. The different degrees of homicide hinge on the amount of intent shown by the perpetrator, not on the status of the victim. If the law admits that the status of the unborn “victim” is always sufficiently unclear that deliberately paying someone to kill your Z/E/F doesn’t show “wanton disregard for human life”, then the law admits that there IS a moral distinction between new-born babies and zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. (For the law to make some distinction based on the actual mental state of the woman or her actual degree of intent would be different; a woman carrying out an abortion on herself with a coat-hanger might well be acting in the heat of some sudden passion, but to suggest that any woman who seeks out someone else to carry out a medical abortion for her must somehow not really be acting with premeditation is patronizing.)
Again, if the pro-life movement doesn’t really accept the moral equivalency of new-born babies and of zygotes, embryos, and fetuses at all stages of pregnancy, why should the rest of us? But of course all that rhetoric about tens of millions of “dead babies” is central to the pro-life movement’s identity.
No, that’s not exactly what Blalron was asking. The question was about burying tampons or pads and holding funerals. First, assuming that the woman knows that the expelled egg was indeed fertilized, why grieve and hold a funeral for it? The egg didn’t experience pain and suffering. And I’ve never heard of funerals for miscarriages, or, if there have been any, they aren’t a common practice. And who would go to the funeral? Funerals are attended by people involved in a persons life. At this point, the egg really didn’t lead a life for people to be involved in it.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. The definitions of murder and manslaughter differ from state to state. Also, some states do have different classes of manslaughter adapted to particular methods of killing. When legislating a new type of death previously accepted by a significant portion of the population, I would expect the legislature to get creative.
This prolifer does accept the moral equivalency of premature termination by a human of babies, zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. That’s not to say that things won’t get very practical very quickly in the legislature. That’s also not to say that prolifers don’t have sympathy for women who feel their life situation is such that they need an abortion, and that that sympathy might lead to a lesser sentence. Again, we must separate the action from the people. We may have sympathy for the people, and desire to prevent the action.
Many factors go into criminal punishment. If that weren’t true, how could drug users go to jail longer than some rapists? Deterrence is a prime factor in criminal punishment. Under one theory, the punishment should be sufficient to deter the action, and no more. If it were more than is required for detterrence, then it would be a waste of government resources. If the type of person that commits the crime is deterred by a lesser sentence, why impose more on them? Given this, a willingness by a prolifer to accept the imposition of a sentence less than the usual murder sentence does not affect the moral position of the prolife movement in any way.
Note that these are my thoughts, not those of any prolife movement, of which I am a member of none. I’m not even on any of their mailing lists. Others may have thought about this issue more than I.
Admittedly, this is not something that prolifers spend any amount of time discussing over coffee (I don’t think), but that is because it is at the boundaries. Nonetheless, I can’t say this isn’t a fair question to test the bounds of prolife logic, and for a prochoicer to learn more about what makes a prolifer tick.
Personally, I think funerals are for the living, not the dead. The dead are the dead. Whether their minds/souls are “in God’s hands” or whether they are snuffed from existence, certainly nothing more can be done for them in this world (IMO). They can be buried, incinerated or flushed. Why are particular methods chosen for some and not others? Because those methods aid the survivors who have an attachment to the dead or to the friends of the dead.
I would expect any prolifer who knows about any miscarriage to experience disappointment at least. Sure, a mother doesn’t cry as much about her fertilized egg not implanting (assuming she knows about it) as she does for her 12 year old son who dies in her arms after a car accident. But that speaks to the subjective level of attachment, not to objective morality.
I think people are justified in handling their dead in any way they deem appropriate. If they bow to societal norms, I do not blame them. After all, as I said, disposal of the dead (funerals and whatnot) are for the surviving society, not the dead.
In summary: Would they be justified in having a service for a miscarried fetus? Sure. Does it happen? Yes, but very, very rarely. Does not having such a service mean they are insincere prolifers? No.
Your point regarding consistency within the pro-life movement intrigued me. Let me ask you this: Do you think the moral position of pro-lifers is strengthened or weakened by the willingness of a very small minority of them to bomb abortion clinics and kill abortionists?
If weakened, is it out of a feeling that no killing can be seen to be in accordance with a pro-life position?
Or is it weakened because only a few of them, and not all of them, are willing to take action to stop what they believe to be a holocaust?
Given the logic of your question, can the lack of unanimity of pro-lifers in supporting violence to stop a holocaust indicate that maybe they don’t all think millions of babies are being killed?
In other words, what does 100% consistency among pro-lifer’s require? Violent but defensive action to protect the innocent? Or a respect for all life, even the lives of murderers?
The answer seems to depend on the observer’s point of view, not the pro-lifer’s point of view, doesn’t it?..and thus is independent from the validity of the pro-life moral position. For example, whether the observer is a pacifist or not, whether the observer recognizes civil disobedience as a legitimate tactic in favor of a just cause or not, and so on, may affect how the observer perceives the actions of pro-lifers as impacting on the moral position held by them.